Not Your Mama’s Feminism: Criminalization by Another Name - Nordic Model Outcomes

Alex Andrews
2 hours ago
4 min read

The Promise vs. the Practice

End-demand laws - often called the Nordic Model - are marketed as a feminist compromise.

Sex workers won’t be punished, advocates insist.
Only buyers will be criminalized. Demand will shrink.
Exploitation will end.
It’s presented as a clean solution to a messy problem: moral clarity without collateral damage.

But policy doesn’t live on paper.

It lives in streets, apartments, courtrooms, and bank accounts. And when end-demand laws are implemented, the outcomes tell a far messier story - one marked by increased surveillance, displacement, and violence, all concentrated on the very people the policy claims to protect.

This isn’t a failure of implementation. It’s a predictable result of how criminalization actually works.

What “Buyer Criminalization” Looks Like in Real Life

In practice, end-demand enforcement still begins with sex workers. Police don’t magically surveil buyers in isolation.

They monitor ads.
They track phones.
They conduct stings.
They stop, question, detain, photograph, and document sex workers’ movements, routines, and associations.

Even when no charges are filed, workers are flagged, watched, and marked as risky.

The first outcome is almost always displacement, not safety.

When buyers fear arrest, transactions don’t stop happening - they move. Meetings shift to darker, more isolated locations. Negotiation time shrinks. Screening becomes riskier. Workers adapt quickly because they have to. Rent is still due. Food still costs money. Survival does not pause for ideology.

The policy claims to punish demand. The lived reality is that sex workers absorb the risk.

Third-Party Criminalization: Safety, Now Illegal

End-demand frameworks rarely stop with buyers. They almost always criminalize “third parties” as well - anyone who might facilitate the work. Drivers, roommates, security, website hosts, receptionists, and even friends sharing housing can be reclassified as criminals.

This has devastating consequences for safety. Strategies that reduce harm - working indoors, sharing space, having someone nearby, using digital platforms, relying on community accountability - are systematically dismantled. The law doesn’t just remove dangerous options; it removes protective ones.

When safety itself becomes a liability, isolation becomes policy.

“If It Were Any Other Job”

To understand how absurd this logic is, it helps to ask a simple question again and again:

What if this thing were criminalized?

What if we decided construction work was too dangerous, so instead of improving labor protections, we criminalized hiring roofers above a certain height?

Roofs would still need fixing.
Workers would still climb.

But jobs would move underground, wages would become more volatile, and oversight of safety would disappear.

No one would call that worker protection.

What if commercial fishing were deemed exploitative, and we criminalized purchasing fish caught during storm season?

The boats would still go out.
The risk would increase.

Workers would face more pressure to take dangerous trips quickly and quietly.

Harm wouldn’t disappear - it would intensify.

What if we addressed workplace injuries in warehouse labor by criminalizing companies that place large orders during peak seasons?

Demand wouldn’t vanish.
It would become more frantic.
Timelines would tighten.
Bodies would absorb the cost.

In every other labor context, we understand this instinctively: criminalizing the transaction does not make dangerous work safer. It makes it riskier, less visible, and more exploitative.

Why Sex Work Is Treated as the Exception

Sex work is the only form of labor where people are encouraged to abandon everything they know about economics, labor dynamics, and human behavior in favor of moral certainty.

End-demand advocates insist that sex workers will simply stop working if demand decreases - as if financial need evaporates when laws change.

But people do not disappear when income becomes unstable. They become more desperate.

For sex workers, that desperation can mean accepting clients they would normally refuse, agreeing to faster negotiations, working in more isolated conditions, or staying in unsafe situations because the cost of saying no is higher.

And for exploitative third parties - pimps, traffickers, abusive managers - reduced demand does not end exploitation. It intensifies it. Control tightens. Pressure increases. Violence escalates. When margins shrink under coercive conditions, exploitation deepens rather than dissolves.

This isn’t ideology. It’s observable behavior across every market shaped by prohibition.

The Feminist Rhetoric That Masks Carceral Power

End-demand laws are often framed as feminist precisely because they claim to reject punishment.

But punishment doesn’t disappear - it’s redistributed. Policing is reframed as care.

Surveillance is renamed protection. Arrest pipelines are softened with therapeutic language.

This allows advocates to hold three comfortable beliefs at once:

I support women.
I oppose violence.
I don’t have to listen to sex workers.

Survivors are filtered, not centered. Those who support criminalization are elevated. Those who support decriminalization are dismissed as confused, coerced, or insufficiently healed.

This isn’t survivor-centered policy - it’s ideological gatekeeping with a trauma aesthetic.

The Receipts: What the Evidence Shows

This is where the receipts come back in. Across countries and cities held up as Nordic Model “success stories,” the documented outcomes repeat with striking consistency: increased police contact, greater displacement, reduced access to health and social services, heightened stigma, and elevated risk of violence.

These outcomes are not accidental. They are the logical result of policies that rely on criminal law to manage labor markets. When safety depends on invisibility, harm becomes harder to report. When support is conditional on compliance, trust erodes. When people fear law enforcement, abusers gain leverage.

If end-demand worked the way it’s advertised, these patterns wouldn’t persist. But they do - because the theory is flawed.

Criminalization by Another Name

Calling it “buyer criminalization” doesn’t change the fact that sex workers’ lives remain criminalized.

Their income is destabilized.
Their safety strategies are restricted.
Their communities are surveilled.
Their choices are constrained by law.

This is not the abolition of harm. It’s its reorganization.

The Question Feminism Must Answer

What if we applied this policy logic consistently? What if we addressed labor market dangers by criminalizing the people who purchase the service rather than investing in safety, labor rights, and resources? What would that world look like?

We already know the answer. It would be more precarious. More unequal. More violent. Less accountable.

Feminism is supposed to reduce harm, not relocate it. It’s supposed to confront power, not flatter it. And it’s supposed to be grounded in evidence, not magical thinking. If a policy makes life more dangerous for the people it claims to protect, it isn’t feminist - no matter how righteous it sounds.